Sunday, April 23, 2017

A New Level And Some Rearrangements

Not much time spent on the game this week, but getting back on the wagon always takes me a few weeks. I wanted the player to play around with switches and linked goals a little bit longer before introducing them to bounce walls, so I made a new level that uses movement, linked goals, and kill walls. I also did some minor rearrangement of levels. I think I may have deleted a level? It's late at night and I'm not sure anymore.

I've been thinking a lot about one piece of feedback from the last playtest I had. Someone wanted to be able to see what the optimal number of charges was for the level they were playing. I really want to be able to reward players for solving the puzzles in the lowest number of charges... I was also thinking about the issue I have where players can simply charge back and forth to clear any goals that require three or fewer hits. I realized that if I limit the number of charges a player has in a level, I increase the difficulty of the game, I increase the chances that people will stumble upon WASD movement, and I inform players of the optimum number of charges while preventing the exploit I mentioned above. However, I would need to clearly communicate the limit that's being imposed on the player, and I would be forcing people to restart levels a lot when they run out of charges. It would both frustrate the player and interrupt their flow, if they had any. I think what I want to do is call out to the player what the "Par" is for the level they are on, like a golf course. Maybe the win screen can inform players of how many charges they solved the level in, and how many charges you can solve the level in. This doesn't prevent people from doing anything, it keeps the game as difficult as it is, but it allows players to more easily seek the "perfect" solution, if that's the kind of gameplay that appeals to them.

Well, enough rambling. The charge-up noise is by Javier Zumer. I use and modify it under this license.